I’ve been experimenting, producing pages with a live photo stream from Instagram for a while now.

I’ve been tapping into their API to pull out a stream of photos (you can use a WordPress plugin) on to the page that paints a visual picture of my travel all in one place instead of randomly scattered across Instagram. It’s a great feature, you can even have groups of people posting photos and they appear on the page live.

Google + Events

Google + events have appeared with the ability to hook the dates up to your calendar and also to provide a live photo stream of the event when in party mode.

This potentially could be a great solution for travel bloggers who want to provide group coverage of a trip in real time.

Embracing new technologies

The Internet is changing at a rapid pace, those looking to offer value for destinations in terms of blogging coverage should keep up to date with developments and evolve with the changes. Blog trip coverage is and will evolve, simply posting blog articles after the trip and tweeting during it won’t be enough. The technology at our disposal is also rapidly developing, from GoPros capable of streaming video footage live on the net via Google hangouts on air to the likes of the Google glasses project things are changing beyond that of blog posts and twitter.

Embracing these technologies and innovating with interest and engaging press trip coverage is something we should strive to do to provide real value for tourism boards and destination marketers.

Who are you influencing?

As a blogger you should be thinking in terms of what you are offering not just in terms of the number of visitors you have but more importantly how much engagement you get and who by?

If it is other bloggers? Then who are you really influencing? Those that wouldn’t pay to visit where you are or where you’ve been? Possibly.